


i know this whole damn city thinks it needs you

by Randstad



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 17:24:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15054143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/pseuds/Randstad
Summary: Cohabitation, like partnership, means rules; it means expectations. It means Hank puts cans in the recycling bin when he's done with them and it means Connor folds the linens and returns them to the closet every morning. It means Hank should be polite enough to text him when a case keeps him out late and it means that Connor, if he decides to arbitrate more vociferously or even violently for his civil rights, should at least leave a note.





	i know this whole damn city thinks it needs you

They stand in the snow for awhile, until Connor can feel the twitches in Hank's fingertips, the shiver beneath his jacket. 

"Lieutenant."

"Yeah," rumbles the voice against his cheek. Gruff and dear. Hank shifts back with his hands still on him, one on his jaw, the other splayed warm on the side of his throat. Bear paws, Connor thinks, apropos of nothing. Sumo paws. With deviancy seems to have come increased capacity for metaphor.

Connor pauses. He imagines what a human would do, if they felt how he felt: the numerous gestures that meant nervousness, the wetting of lips or a flinch. He doesn't do any of that. Hank does enough for both of them; under the ruff of his hair Connor's periphery catches the movement of his pulse in his neck.

"Do you like me?" he hears himself ask abruptly. There's a levity to his voice he can't honestly say he feels.

Hank's hands pause. "For fuck's sake. You're just wondering that now?"

"No. No, I ..." That's not what he meant to ask. "That's not what I meant to say. But we'll start there."

Between them Hank scoffs, and lets the question hang for a few seconds before he says, "You think I almost get my ass killed for just anybody?" The question accompanied by a sniff. His immune system, weakened from the winter cold, has left him halfway congested for weeks. His thumb curves along Connor's jaw and Connor thinks yes, good, and then he feels a little bit blithely guilty, but nowhere nearly guilty enough to make it all stop. 

He leans in, in fact. Hank's hand leans with him, as if Hank, despite having owned only dogs since he was a boy, knows instinctively what to do with more reticent animals. As if Hank has experience in touching him, when they both know he has determinedly avoided physical contact at every juncture since they met. Perhaps Hank is a natural. The thought makes Connor smile. "I believe you're not supposed to answer questions with more questions, Lieutenant."

Hank grumbles indistinctly under his breath and lets the silence afterwards hang as well, until finally he looks away. "Yeah, kid. I like you just fine." His hands fall away. "Don't go telling anybody, now."

He's as aware that it is a rhetorical demand as he is of the fact that he would like to tell everybody, actually. He is also aware of the fact that between the two of them they know less than ten people who would care. He would like to ask Hank deeper and more meaningful questions. He wants to know what his fingers would feel like interlaced at the back of Hank's neck.

He does none of this. He inclines his head instead, unable to suppress a twitch at the corners of his mouth. Hank seems to interpret it as another smile and smiles as well. As if he doesn't know what this newfound uncertainty is doing to Connor, in the spaces between breaths and blinks. 

"If it's alright with you, Lieutenant," he says, "it's not my preference to be away from you."

The words are carefully selected to minimize any hint of forceful imposition, but Hank shuffles his feet anyway, awkwardly. "Yeah, well. It's not my _preference_ to be standing around in the snow like a jackass when the truck's closed." He shoves his hands back in his pockets and jerks his head towards where he's parked on the street. "Come on. I've got food at home."

Connor almost chirps about how he doesn't eat, but then the sound of Hank's worn steel toes in the snow illuminates the odd quiet of the city, the midday absence of lunchtime traffic. It's Sunday, he remembers. People rest on Sundays. He trots after Hank in the snow, takes careful mental notes of the assemblage of their footprints in the snow, hears the click of Hank's key fob. Too much to like, or dislike, or choose to ignore. He wonders if he'll ever rest again.

  


_Food at home_ turns into the Gears game, taking Sumo outside, Hank dusting off the long-unused spare linens even though all Connor needs for shutdown processes at night is to sit or stand. He watches Hank fluff the throw pillows into usable shape and has to remind himself that Hank does not _care_ , exactly, if Connor mimics humanity precisely in these small ways; Hank despite his attitude will probably not care in the long run if Connor chooses to simply sit and stare blankly at nothing for four to eight hours while Hank sleeps. But it mediates the way Hank thinks about him in ways that may someday close doors to rooms Connor does not know. In the interest of keeping those doors open Connor takes the sofa. 

Cohabitation, like partnership, means rules; it means expectations. It means Hank puts cans in the recycling bin when he's done with them and it means Connor folds the linens and returns them to the closet every morning. It means Hank should be polite enough to text him when a case keeps him out late and it means that Connor, if he decides to arbitrate more vociferously or even violently for his civil rights, should at least leave a note.

It means they take walks in the mornings when Hank doesn't have night shift. Sumo is loath to go farther than the end of the block, which Connor attributes to a sedentary lifestyle and perhaps a genealogy that portends joint issues in the future, but with enough persistence and pleasantry he can tempt Hank to take the long way around. Between walks that may yet someday become runs and gentle chiding about his drinking habits it's possible Hank will experience a substantive improvement in his overall health and day-to-day temperament within two years. Possible, not probable. Connor would like to see it through.

When they walk Connor is acutely aware of the way their hands hang in the space between them. He wonders at the aimless difficulty of recreating that day in the snow when he can so easily recreate that feeling, the one that had unfurled in his chest pressed tight against Hank's. Or rather, the feeling recreates itself. Every day, in the spaces between words, seconds. A slow repeat unfolding, like projections of shapes in rotation.

He is sixty percent certain it would be as easy as taking Hank's hand one morning. But sixty percent is a good enough probability of success to chase a victim onto a busy highway, or jump from a tall ledge. Not for this. No room for failure in this.

  


Fowler calls one night when they're alone. Pizza for the third time this week, which Connor thinks is a bit wasteful. The pots and pans in Hank's cabinets have a film of dust, though, wood laminate chips. Someone should clean those. Connor wasn't made to clean and now can decide whether or not he would like to clean. He'll consider it for awhile longer, but until then, this rhythm—pizza, takeout, no-breakfast-just-coffee.

And calls from the precinct, even when Hank is distinctly off-duty, had just wrapped up a bundle of night shifts in fact. Connor can hear the call in fine detail, the timbre of Fowler's voice, but he lets Hank relay the message anyway once he's done with his idea of pleasantries: Jesus, that's worse than a beat cop, are you kidding? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Actually, I don't get it, and think it can go fuck itself, but I'll ask him. Thanks.

The call ends and Hank looks up. "They put you on payroll. You're on desk duty till all this shit dies down, though."

Desk duty seems harmless enough. "That seems harmless enough," Connor says brightly. Maybe that's the idea, he thinks with uncharacteristic dark amusement. 

Hank doesn't seem satisfied with the response, though. As if he can hear Connor's thoughts as well as Connor heard his conversation with Captain Fowler. He fiddles with his phone, then puts it down on the table. "You know you don't have to go back, though, right? Now that you've got free will and shit." _Free will and shit_ , Connor mouths to himself, but Hank doesn't notice. "Personally, I'd take one look at the check they're gonna try and hand you and tell them to shove it up their asses."

"It's not," Connor begins, almost finishes _my preference to be away from you_ —and then he cocks his head to one side and makes corrections. "I like working with you." If he reminds Hank of that day he asked to stay then Hank may be reminded that eventually he may have to leave. He tilts his head to one side and lets his gaze drift. "And a deviant within the police force may prove useful in the development of constructive public discourse."

It's further from the truth but it seems to bring Hank greater satisfaction. He huffs and leans back in his seat, one arm slung over the back. "Still trying to be one of the good ones, huh."

"Not even a little," he says brightly; he tops it off with a wink and Hank does three things simultaneously: scoffs, turns faintly pink in the ears, reaches for his cold beer.

  


There are some pithy humans who believe the brain is the self and the body is the vehicle for the self, and by extension sensation and emotions are defined only by how one chooses to define them. If this is true, if all things are relative, Connor can define what he feels. The unpleasantness he feels when a criminal hits him was never pain, doesn't have to be dismay. The things he feels when Hank touches him, lingers too long, frets or fusses, they are what Connor makes them. His knowledge of Hank can simply be encyclopedic, with no other purpose. 

And what he knows about Hank by now spans shelves, memory banks. Hank likes red meat, even though he should eat less of it. Hank did finish his grief counseling and not because anyone told him to. Hank wears irritation like an old shirt. Hank has many old shirts. Hank and anger are old friends. Hank doesn't have many friends.

Connor is his friend. Connor likes being his friend—he'd liked that before deviancy. Liked burger joints and case files and Hank telling him to stop putting his mouth on shit. An encyclopedic enjoyment at first, tick marks beside all interactions that went better than expected. Looking forward, just a little, to the job that didn't pay him and its violences, its bureaucracy, that put him beside Hank in the car. And then other small pleasures. And then. And then.

Connor has wants now, and is entitled to the feeling of want if not the actual object of that want, so he reasons it's okay to think to himself: yes, he wants Hank. A porous, humid want. Summer-sticky and bright. It makes him happy to want Hank and it makes him agitated that he can't be happy about it around Hank. He is reasonably sure no one else they know wants Hank the way he wants Hank and that too is its own source of inexplicable satisfaction. Perhaps his desire was the first thing he owned, unique to him. His shirt, jacket, and necktie were regulation, but not this.

He knows now he can define it all how he wishes. The freedom of deviancy feels like a chasm, over which he gazes into the unknown dark and sees only the movement of shadows, too indistinct to resemble real possibilities. His desire for certainty feels preprogrammed, every other desire less so. Less understandable. But no less desired.

  


It stops snowing as hard; the ice on the roads melts. February beckons with an early heat. Basketball season is still underway.

Late one night they're sitting together, watching the Gears game. Connor enjoys basketball—the athleticism, the occasional pettiness of players, the garish colors and equally garish enthusiasm of fans like Hank. Hank, who slams a hand on the table whenever the opposition makes a three-pointer, who yells at the television, takes hearty gulps of beer on commercial breaks.

He also enjoys Hank's old Gears sweatshirt, big enough to swallow up his hands at the wrists, the neckline pulled loose from carelessness. The sweater smells of light mildew and something uniquely Hank Anderson. But, well. That's just a bonus.

The Gears score in overtime and Hank actually bolts up in jubilation, whoops. " _Fuck_ yeah," he hollers, his voice weighty as a bass drum, " _that's_ what I'm talking about." He reaches for Connor—the light on Connor's temple yellows instantaneously, and abruptly it's November again, cold, and the only touch in the world is Hank's hands on his chin and throat, rebellion hot and nauseous in his veins and rebellion careless and light in Hank's fingertips. That day tears through him like a thunderclap. That day. No day since, but that day, perhaps today— 

Hank braces an arm around Connor's shoulders and squeezes, claps his hand on Connor's upper arm. The touch lingers for a heartbeat, then he lets go and slaps his hands on his knees as he stands. "Think that calls for another drink."

Connor blinks at his toes. He lifts a hand to his shoulder where Hank touched him. Without the aid of analysis he finds carelessness, levity, yes. But no rebellion. Not an ounce. 

  


When Connor reflects on his time at Hank's home he knows: he is still on the sofa and Hank does not touch him. Hank runs on the treadmill at the precinct and doesn't bother to lie about it, because he knows Connor will know. He doesn't drink hard liquor on work nights. For these reasons Connor can view his presence in Hank's home as a net positive.

And because it has been a net positive Connor reasons he isn't being disingenuous when he slides Hank's coffee mug over to him from across his desk and says brightly, "Lieutenant. I have found a place to live and will reside there beginning tomorrow."

"Uh-huh," Hank says, the glow of the laptop screen delving deep in the lines in his face, and then he does look up. "Hold on. What the fuck?"

"I have found a place to live and will reside there beginning tomorrow," he says brightly again, in the exact same intonation as before. He doesn't do this because he knows Hank hates it. There are many things he does independent of what Hank likes or wants or needs. "There are landlords who have put up affordable listings for androids, as of the new home ownership ordinance. The listing I found has a bus route that leads to Munroe Avenue, just past the precinct." He smiles. "It won't compromise my punctuality."

"Wait, wait, slow the fuck down." There's a click as Hank shuts the laptop. He passes his hand over his face as if he can scrub away his caffeine withdrawal headache. With his knuckles Connor scoots the mug closer to him; he takes it without thinking. "You're moving tomorrow?"

"I didn't think of it as moving, as I don't technically live in your home and I also don't have any personal possessions. But yes, tomorrow."

"Jesus. You in a hurry or something? Why didn't you tell me?"

It's a good question with a complex answer. Connor found the listing this morning, for starters; he had sent his query just before breakfast and had received an answer in the affirmative fifteen minutes later, which he found pleasantly efficient, even if he was charitable enough to recognize he hadn't completely thought this through. 

The facts are: Connor has been on the sofa; Hank has been in his bed. Hank will always have his bed and Connor will not always have that sofa. The chasm of his deviancy remains dark and unknowable despite the best efforts of androids like Markus to bear a torch down the path. Hank held him in front of Chicken Feed and Connor thought he could sink through the snow, the ground, dissemble like organic flesh left too long in the sun. 

Hank patted his shoulder last night. It was friendly. They are friends. 

And yet Connor had felt something red and wincing in him in that moment, shocking in its violence and too inappropriate to be harbored even privately in his friend's home. That chasm yawned at his feet and the light at his temple, the one that says he thinks and analyzes and processes, could not light the way. 

  


He reads the contract on Hank's lunch break and shares a quick email exchange with the landlady. He takes the bus directly to the listing afterwards. Per his correspondence with the polite, remote woman he finds the key under the mat. 

The apartment is a tiny studio. They will probably make units without kitchens or bathrooms soon, for androids. He marvels at the rot on the windowsills, the scratches on the hardwood, the spider web that spreads like an open hand in the corner of the kitchen entryway.

He stands there for twenty minutes, assessing, at which point there's a familiar heavy-handed knock on the door. Connor turns and opens it, not particularly because he wants to but because he has difficulty denying the man on the other side. 

"You forgot something," Hank says, but his hands are just full of worn Detroit Gears sweatshirt. 

Connor gazes at it with his default indifference. "It's not mine."

"Yeah, I lied." But Hank thrusts the sweater at him anyway, and with a level of vigor that leaves Connor with no choice but to take it. He thumbs over a piece of lint at the shoulder seam as Hank says, "Now tell me what the fuck is going on with you."

"There's nothing going on with me."

"Bullshit." Hank sways further in the doorway, big and lumbering and blissfully sober, but Connor does not step back to allow him room. "I don't need your fucking mood ring to tell me that you're pissed off, so why don't you just—" 

"I want you," Connor says.

He hadn't realized how good it would feel, to think it and then say it aloud. He doesn't make _I_ statements often, or generally, but there's a touch of triumph to the act. Inappropriately a secondary processor stipulates maybe this is why humans blog. 

"Sorry?" Hank says. It may be the first time Hank has ever said that word to him, at him, but it's not an apology. Connor has to suppress the urge to laugh and cry at the same time, as if those are natural physical reflexes that reflect what he feels and not just the rediverted desire to scream. 

Connor does none of those things. He starts to refold the sweater, still standing. "I," he says carefully as he tamps his fingers down the middle crease, "want you." He tilts his head to the side thoughtfully and turns the sweater on its side at the same time to press the sleeves in. This lesson too he owes to Hank. So much debt unpaid. "I'm not sure I can live in your home without compromising our friendship."

The quarter fold last. He hands the Gears sweater back to Hank, whose whole face is a crease by now, one deep and assessing frown.

"I look forward to seeing you at work tomorrow. Good night, Lieutenant."

But as he moves to shut the door Hank slams his fist on the wood to keep it open. It thrills a little, the clumsy strength he carries, his overeagerness to use it. Enough, Connor thinks. Enough. "Why didn't you say something?" 

This too is a good question. Hank knows how to ask good questions, how to cut to the bleeding open heart of a matter, because he's a bleeding open heart himself. Even now Connor aches with the desire to hold that heart in his hands. He would do it so carefully. Minimize spillage. 

He doesn't know how to say that. Doesn't know how to want this. "I literally don't know how," he says bluntly.

He tries to shut the door again but Hank keeps his fist on the wood. He's stronger than Hank, but the door isn't, which leaves them in a stalemate. Unstoppable force and immovable object: some days Hank is one and some days he is the other. 

Hank says, "Hold the fuck on. You just did." He looks frustrated at the fact that he has to argue semantics with a machine that runs on semantics. A person that runs on semantics. A person who enjoys semantics. "Didn't you?"

Connor stares at Hank, at the triplicate lights of intrigue and challenge and terror in his eyes, the loose fall of his hair over the angled sides of his jaw. He cannot scare him away with the suggestion that he too feels frustration; that fact has only made Hank like him more. Instead he lets this silence persist too, until he says at last, "Those words aren't ... what I would call sufficient."

"So read some fucking poetry or something. Or just—" 

Hank pushes the door again and Connor lets him. It's still easier, after deviancy, to just let him. So much easier to let him happen, in this brave new world. To never ask. A forty percent chance of failure, but what was failure really, when he thought of it like that? Did it exist in gradations? Was it to ask and lose him? Or to never ask?

In this empty infinitesimal space Hank feels huge, as if he has gravitational pull, and Connor wants—desperately, he wants— 

"Jesus. I don't know." Hank touches him like that day and Connor feels the abrupt clench of his own shoulders, his chest cavity, his bleating mind: big hand on Connor's jaw, big hand on Connor's throat. "Just try."

  


This place is not his home. If he would like it to be, Connor has to return a signed contract via email by midnight tonight. He probably will not, so he probably shouldn't still be here. 

It is almost ten now, and he is saying, very quietly, experimentally, "I've wanted you to touch me again since our embrace in November. You have touched me less than seventy times since then—which I think is _absurd_ for two people who live together—over ninety percent of which were for professional reasons."

Hank laughs, all wry sorrow. "Connor, I don't know if you noticed I'm a washed-up old fuck—"

Connor touches fingers to his lips. "I thought you wanted me to talk."

"Fuck. Okay." Hank's arm comes around him again. He doesn't sit cross-legged often but he is making a special allowance for Connor and Connor intends to make the most of it.

Besides, his lap is. It's big.

"Start over," Hank says.

  


"I've wanted you to touch me like you did in November. You haven't." 

Hank doesn't speak but his hands move. 

"I'm feeling ... a lot of new things. It's causing me a little, hmm. Anxiety?"

He is divesting Connor of his jacket and Connor is letting him. 

"Perhaps I hoped your fear would be less than mine."

He is pulling Connor's necktie loose. Connor is letting him. 

"It makes me happy to be with you, Lieutenant." 

It makes him happy, deliriously happy, to say the words. To say anything at all with his mouth on the silver stubble of Hank's jawline. His fingers are laced behind Hank's neck. He knows this is no simulation. He did not dream this. Did not dream any future after that touch on the sofa, the abrupt and fearful shuttering of his desire. 

He draws back to look him in the face. Their noses bump. "Are you happy to be with me?" 

Hank, distracted, in the middle of unbuttoning his shirt. "Oh, _now_ you want me to talk," he says, but what he does instead is wrap his hand behind Connor's head and kiss him, deep and sweet and vexing, and he tastes like stale coffee and a lone peppermint and human, and he smells like someone who worked thirteen hours and human, and Connor puts his hand on his big wrist and sinks further in his big lap and says, yes, at last, what he needs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to wonderful [Lauren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonethief) for the last-minute edit.
> 
> Catch me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/docfission) or [Tumblr](http://docfission.tumblr.com/)!


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